


Summer Falls

by warriorpoet



Category: Fake News RPF
Genre: M/M, Outing, Public Scandal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-11
Updated: 2008-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-11 20:50:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/pseuds/warriorpoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon and Stephen are suddenly and publicly outed at a very early and uncertain stage in their relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer Falls

**Author's Note:**

> In what, in retrospect, seems to be part of an unintentional series of overly angsty Jon/Stephen fics I wrote all inspired by the music of one band, this owes a lot of credit to the song "Summer Falls" by Seafood.

The first time they have sex, it is an accident.

Entering an intersection at the same time, distracted, a little inebriated, feeling reckless and indestructible, momentarily disregarding all rules of the road.

The wreckage is ugly. It is no small miracle when they both walk away unharmed.

The second time is deliberate and slow, exquisitely slow. Their eyes are locked together the whole time and barely a word is spoken. There is nothing left that needs to be said.

After the third time, Stephen calls Evelyn and finally relents. After this almost-year of trial separation turned indefinite rift, he will sign the papers. He expects to feel like he has failed and is surprised when he does not. Because he has Jon. He has Jon the way he's wanted him for so long and never thought possible. This is a new manner of victory.

They spend many nights together in Stephen's Upper West Side rental because it is closer to work and neither wishes to waste a second of their stolen time together on something as mundane as a commute. Stephen casually jokes about renewing his lease every three months, how this was supposed to be a temporary crash pad, and now...

Jon finishes his thought and tries to break it to him gently.

"Maybe sign up for another three months, huh? I mean - it's - I think... we should take this slowly. There are so many reasons not to jump straight in the deep end with this - "

Stephen cuts him off with a soft kiss. "I know," he smiles, that tiny smile that could be something so much bigger were he not holding back. "But... y'know. If you want your own drawer here, I'd love to have some of your socks and underwear for a roommate."

Jon snorts, which turns into a giggle, which in turn means Stephen just has to start kissing him again.

His best friend's lips work their way from mouth to jaw to neck to collarbone... teeth grazing a nipple, and tongue playfully poking around his navel. Down, down, down, and Stephen's hands are in his shorts and oh, god, how can something that still seems so surreal feel so fucking right?

The nights turn to days turn to weeks and still there is no answer to that question.

\--

Summer falls, and together they watch Central Park get greener and greener until the spindly branches soaked black by spring showers are all but a distant memory.

Summer falls, and they spend one whole weekend at Jon's with the air conditioner blasting arctic temperatures, lazily making love while the rest of the city swelters below them and melting asphalt almost turns the streets to sludge.

Summer falls, and the Democrats finally pick their nominee. 

"We need some kind of big shindig. Get this crap out of our systems before we have to start working on going on the road to the conventions," Jon tells Stephen.

"Shindig? No, count me out. You know I'm more of a hootenanny man," Stephen deadpans.

Jon sighs dramatically. "I'm willing to compromise down to a sock hop, but that is my final offer."

"But we're not even going to the conventions. You're going. And you're leaving me all on my little lonesome - "

"Just shut up and go tell everybody we're having a fucking party."

The night is warm and spirits high. Liquor flows and music plays and nobody seems to notice when Jon and Stephen slip out to the terrace.

Giddy, happy, they sneak a tender kiss.

Summer falls, and the slow news days begin to pile up.

Jon has to come up with a new answer when the audience asks, "Do you think the Democrats will really win in November?"

"You know, last year I was answering that question by saying I was sure they'd find some way to fuck it up, and then they came so close to doing that. And for once, I hated being right."

Here he pauses while they laugh and he smiles sheepishly.

"But now... now I'm cautiously optimistic, and that kind of thinking feels so wrong to me. I'm sure there's still time for Murphy's Law to factor in and kick their asses. That son of a bitch Murphy always shows up when you least expect him to."

TMZ gets a hold of the footage first. It's low-res and a little shaky. But it's unmistakeably them and they are unmistakably together, stealing a kiss on that terrace that summer night they thought they were alone. Fox News gleefully airs it first. They run it into the ground.

Summer falls, and so does the world around them.

\--

Jon escapes to Los Angeles because it’s the last place anyone would expect to find him. The irony of hiding from public scrutiny in the world’s largest human zoo is not lost on him. The absurdity of it all is his mouth-breathing overweight seatmate on the five hour flight.

Ed picks him up at the airport in a hat and dark glasses. Jon gives him a sarcastic smile at the baggage carousel and Ed laughs a little. 

“Well…”

“Yeah. Fucking well.”

“Congratulations though. Really.”

Jon softens and nods, eyes downcast. “Thank you.”

The 110 is all bleached concrete and too much fucking sun. It dries Jon’s eyes out.

“So, Steve’s still in Vancouver, but – "

“Yeah. He called Stephen.”

Ed darts his head from the road to Jon and back. “Really? I haven’t talked to him yet. What did he say?”

“He said he should’ve known.”

They’re silent for a mile.

“But it’s barely been two months. We didn’t even know. This is – it’s just – it’s hard to keep pace with everything, y’know?”

Ed nods. He doesn’t know, not really. But he nods anyway.

\--

Jon has been there a day and a half, tucked away in the modest bungalow in the foothills of Griffith Park, when the phone starts to ring.

He’s on the couch, thinking about falling asleep and thinking about going to the kitchen for a beer, purposefully avoiding anything that looks remotely like cable news. Ed’s out, doing whatever it is Ed does when he’s on vacation and his old boss is hiding in his guest bedroom under circumstances that make hanging around the house more awkward than it should be, so Jon just lets the phone trill away until the recorded voice of “Edward Helms, esquire,” cuts it off.

Jon doesn’t really listen to the message until he hears his name. It’s somebody, Ed’s publicist or manager or agent, he doesn’t know, it doesn’t really matter, complaining that Ed needs to answer his damn cell and they have a dozen calls from people wanting to reach Ed in order to track down Jon Stewart, does Ed know anything about this? Can Ed please call back?

Jon curses under his breath and checks his own missed call list. He likes nothing he sees and deletes them one by one.

He goes outside and sits in a lawn chair, clay tile scraping his bare feet. Sunlight dances on the lagoon-green surface of the pool, moving with the trees, and the only sound is far-off traffic. Always there is traffic.

\--

Stephen finally calls on the fourth day.

“They’ve found me,” he says miserably, without greeting.

“Are they bothering the kids?”

“No, not yet, thank god. They’re just parked at the end of the goddamn driveway. It’s a circus. I’d expect this bullshit in New York, but fuck it, don’t fucking infest my fucking home town.”

Jon can tell the degree of Stephen’s fury by the way his cursing escalates. When he’s truly mad, he always starts out trying to hold back until, despite his sometimes seemingly endless reserve of emotional strength, it all comes pouring out.

“Ed’s been getting some calls from people.”

“What? For how long?”

“A few days.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to worry.” 

“Fuck,” it’s barely a whisper and then Stephen is silent for a long moment.

Jon can hear the ticking of his own watch, wrapped around the wrist attached to the hand clutching the phone pressed to his ear. The seconds march by, each click just loud intrusive background noise like shots in a war zone.

Stephen's voice finally returns to drown it all out. "Should we... maybe we should just give up and go home?"

Jon sighs, resigned to it, knowing that reality, no matter how unreal it presently seems, will not tolerate their absence for long. “I guess we might as well. Break’s over in a week anyway.”

“Week and a half.”

“I miss you,” Jon says, and the roughness of his voice, like he’s spent a year under a vow of silence, shocks him.

“I miss you too,” Stephen says. Jon can hear the smile and then he hears a small voice far away asking “Daddy?” and then Stephen is gone.

He pictures himself in that house by the beach in South Carolina, him and Stephen and five children and his heart aches a little. He can’t call it love yet, no matter how much he might want to. 

It’s all happening too fast.

\--

Jon is swept away from the house in Los Feliz on a flood of thank yous and apologies. Ed shrugs it off and offers again to drive him to the airport, but no, there’s no point in the covert ops crap any more.

“Don’t be a stranger, okay? You’re welcome here any time. Both of you,” Ed says.

“Thanks,” Jon smiles crookedly and wonders how long before they’re in the old-married-couple-visiting-old-friends stage. Three weeks? Four? Can they make it there?

Ed tells Jon to give his love to Stephen, not in a gay way though, ha ha, and Jon laughs even though it isn’t really funny and the driver waiting outside honks again. 

Airport. Steel tube hurtling through space. Another airport. Another car service.

One lone paparazzi showers him in exploding flash light when he gets out on Hudson Street. Jon is blinded but he still manages to catch the disappointment in the guy’s face when nobody follows Jon out of the car.

He’s tempted to punch the bastard. Fuck it; just bring everything down at once and get it over with. He doesn’t though, just mutters something under his breath that might be “parasite” or “piece of shit” and ducks his head and hurries inside.

The apartment is achingly empty. That it'll probably stay that way now makes it worse.

\--

Stephen shows up well after midnight when the photographer has abandoned his vigil and sped off in search of the real news: some starlet sans dignity in the bathroom of whatever club is playing host to the famous-for-being-famous crowd this week.

"Is this all really so bad?" Stephen murmurs into Jon's hair as they hold each other for the first time in a week.

"What do you mean?"

"Is it so bad that everyone knows about us. I mean, we would've come out with it eventually, right?" 

Jon's shoulders tense beneath Stephen's hands. Stephen pulls away and looks earnestly into his eyes.

"Right?" It comes out a cracked plea.

Jon's lack of response is answer enough.

Stephen steps further away and exhales, long and slow, like at the end of this breath he might decide that taking another one in is just more trouble than it's worth.

"I think we should talk about where we're at with this," Jon says quietly.

"Yeah. Yeah, it looks that way," Stephen nods and deposits himself on the couch. Dark brown suede with a faded aubergine stain on the cushion like a Rorschach test. To him it looks kind of like a Phoenix rising from the pyre only to turn back and devour its own tail. Then he remembers that it's just some hastily cleaned toddler-induced spill, and any hidden message he might have seen there is gone.

"I - " Jon stops and closes his eyes, scrunching them shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I don't know if I can do this with everyone watching. Fuck, it was bad enough trying to keep my private life private before, and now... with this, and it's you, and... fuck, we're guys and we're having sex and I'm still trying to wrap my head around that without having to put out a fucking press release about it."

"But do you want to be with me?" Stephen says, so quiet he can hardly hear it over the nervous pounding of his heart.

"I do, Stephen, god, I've been happier these last few weeks than I've been since... for a long time. But... not like this."

"If we'd had longer, if something about us together had come out later, would you... would it...?"

"If we'd had control of it, and we'd made a decision about it together, and if we were ready, I would've had no problem with shouting it from the fucking rooftops," Jon squeezes Stephen's hand, a tiny apology.

"Then what difference does it make? We go out there, say 'Yeah, we're in love, who gives a shit?', everyone will get bored of it when there's no more scandal, life goes on. Our lives will go on," Stephen rests his forehead against Jon's, traps him with a hand at his neck.

"W-We're in love?"

There's nothing left to lose.

"I know I am."

"Fuck," Jon breathes.

"I'm sorry, I just needed to - "

Jon's lips find Stephen's. The end of the sentence is lost.

\--

They decide to ignore it. Ignore their publicists, ignore the photographers, ignore the interview requests from Larry King and Oprah and everybody else throwing in their bids. They send a heartfelt thank you note to Anderson Cooper when they hear that he refused to touch the story, despite the pressure he was getting from CNN. They thank him and send an expensive bottle of champagne but don't confirm or deny. They're careful now.

Jon doesn't take any audience questions on his first show back. He opens with a barely-restrained smirk and muses, "So, I guess we didn't miss too much news while we were on vacation, huh?" 

He glances down at the desk and scribbles on his script some more. 

"Gee, where the fuck are Britney's drug problems and OJ's double-homicide-kleptomania-speeding-ticket, and Paris Hilton's vagina's dog's new line of purses when you need them?"

He rolls his eyes and takes a deep breath. "Anyway, turning to our continuing coverage of Indecision 2008..."

\--

The audience screams louder than ever when Stephen appears for the toss.

"Before we go, let's check in with our very good friend Stephen Colbert over at the Colbert Report! Stephen!"

"Jon."

"Nice to see you again. You get up to anything over the break?"

"Ah... nope. You?"

"Nothing whatsoever."

Stephen raises his eyebrow and taps his pen on the desk. "No, ah... no gay sex scandal things at all?"

"No... why - why would you say that?" Jon asks, staying in perfect wide-eyed-innocence character while the audience hoots with joy.

"Um... no reason."

"Why, did you hear something?"

"No, Jon. It's hard to hear anything over the sound of you screaming my name in ecstasy."

Jon breaks into laughter. That was not quite what they scripted. "We'll see you in a minute, Stephen."

On the monitor, he jumps over the desk, arms reaching out. "I love you, baby!"

That night's Moment of Zen: a clip from the O'Reilly Factor of Bill enjoying the footage of those liberal secular fags a little too much.

\--

The blogosphere goes crazy within minutes. The story picks up again. People start to speculate that maybe the footage was a fake? Maybe they were joking? Maybe not? Why haven't they said anything serious?

It dies down.

The campaign heats up again. The news days are fast.

Stephen lets his lease run out and moves in to Jon's apartment while Jon's away in Saint Paul.

Summer fades.

\--

Late that fall, Jon and Stephen are photographed holding hands in a restaurant in Tribeca.

The picture is sold, buried in the back of a tabloid, linked on a website or two.

They're old news now. It was an accident that they were ever news at all. And it is no small miracle that they walked away, together, unharmed.


End file.
